THERE’s going to be a big fancy Luke-and-Laura-style wedding on “Desperate Housewives” later this year – and the betting is that Susan and her rich English boyfriend are taking the plunge.

“A big, legendary soap-opera wedding, the kind that folks are hopefully going to tune in for,” the show’s creator, Marc Cherry, said yesterday in an interview published in the online newsletter Media Village.

At the end of last Sunday’s episode, Susan, the conflicted divorcee played by Teri Hatcher, was seen turning her back on Mike (James Denton), her longtime love interest, and running to her new boyfriend, Tom (Dougray Scott).

After months of back and forth between the two men, it seems clear now that she has chosen Tom.

Cherry – who must be in a spoiler mood these days – said there will be “a quickie wedding” also this year.

After a lackluster second season, the show – a light-touch takeoff on the soap-opera lives of four women on fictional Wisteria Lane – has had a terrific comeback this year with some surprising plot twists and a resurgence in the ratings.

The high point was a shoot-out in a suburban supermarket that was water-cooler talk among fans for days.

“I told the staff on the first day of Season Three that I had this idea for a hostage episode set in a supermarket and I wanted a housewife to take the whole place hostage,” he said. “She’s taking the place hostage because her husband had an affair.

“That’s what I walked in with. And we started building it.”

“I’m so proud of that one,” said Cherry. “It really turned out well. I’ve had a lot of ideas that didn’t always work out. But that one really came out beautifully.”

Among the other twists this year, he says, will be an episode about the men of Wisteria Lane – to be narrated by Bree’s dead husband, Rex.

That will be a departure for “Desperate Housewives” – which has always been narrated by a friend of the Wisteria women, Mary Alice, who committed suicide in the show’s first episode.

Rex died at the end of the first season.

“Teri Hatcher was the one who said to me at the end of season one, ‘It’s a shame now that Rex has died that he can’t narrate,'” Cherry said.

“I thought that was interesting. Steven Culp [who played Rex] and I have kept in contact so I called him and he thought it was a fun idea.”